The authors of a new report are calling for a global war on the counterfeiting of medicine, arguing that a “transnational” approach is the key to fighting a problem estimated to cost 700,000 lives a year.
Recent estimates are that perhaps 15 percent of the global medicine supply is phony, with that ratio rising to more than 30 percent in developing regions of Africa, Asia and Latin America. The U.S. Center for Medicine in the Public Interest estimates that the counterfeit drug market is worth about $75 billion a year. But this “global health crisis” has been slipping under the law enforcement radar, say the authors of an article published in the Journal of International Criminal Justice.
“Criminals who deal in counterfeit medicines do so with little fear and few consequences,” asserts the article by Roger Bate, a fellow of the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., and University of Ottawa law professors Amir Attaran and Megan Kendall. “For, remarkably, there is today no international legal framework to pursue and punish those who counterfeit medicines and traffic them across borders.”
A previous study estimated that phony drugs kill 700,000 people a year because so many of the drugs used to treat diseases such as malaria and tuberculosis are fake. The article’s authors say that assessment “omits the more intangible damage done to public health. Patients who take counterfeits and fail to get better understandably lose faith in the healing powers of modern medicine, and especially in poor countries they may turn instead to traditional healers or quacks.”
Counterfeit drugs for infectious diseases that have below-therapeutic levels of the active ingredient are “especially insidious,” the authors say, because they can spur drug-resistant pathogens.
The solution? The authors recommend, among other things, classifying medicine counterfeiting as “a specific crime against humanity” and drafting a counterfeit medicine treaty under the auspices of the World Health Organization, which has previously exercised its treaty power to fight the scourge of counterfeit cigarettes.
